Review Summary

As if underscoring their film’s essential witlessness, the folks at Marvel Entertainment have inexplicably missed the opportunity to make a splash by opening “Thor: The Dark World” on a Thursday. But repackaging a Norse god as an alien superhero takes chutzpah, not humor (unless you count the Viking ship that serves as his spacecraft), and movie studios have yet to lose money by assuming that their audiences have the intellectual discernment of newborns. So if the multiple idiocies on view strike you as neither here nor there, it’s probably because your eyeballs are too busy recoiling from the onslaught of disorienting 3-D effects, or else too distracted by the title character’s Popeye arms and really big mallet. — Jeannette Catsoulis